The Heritage Foundation’s ‘civil war’
There’s an internal struggle in the conservative institution over how to "harness the energy unleashed by Trumpism without being completely overrun by its conspiracy- and nativist-minded elements, particularly among the rising generation that has known little else,” says The New York Times Magazine.
Beginning in 1980, the Heritage Foundation published a policy manual, the “Mandate for Leadership,” for any potential incoming Republican administration. Ronald Reagan used the first issue as a script for the Reagan era, the Times says.
But the Heritage Foundation and its retitled “Project 2025” policy manual have faced challenges for dominance in the second Trump administration from the America First Policy Institute, founded by officials from the first Trump administration, which had its own manual.
And the Heritage Foundation leadership has been less and less interested in the opinions of experts over time, former staffers have told the Times. By late 2025, President Kevin Roberts said he'd hired 60 percent of the staff. Some of the people Roberts hired seemed less interested in the intricacies of policy than in the "exigencies of the culture wars,” says the Times.
Debates over World War II became popular, with “rehashing and going through who was the bad guy and who were the good guys,” says Richard Stern, the former director of Heritage’s budget center who now is at Mike Pence’s organization “Advancing American Freedom.”
Many of the staff members who left Heritage quit over what they saw as the institution’s failure to distance itself from extremists and trolls, says the Times. One former senior analyst said these groups “always existed out there, but they never seized main institutions before. That’s what’s new.”
Roberts himself seemed eager "to join in the rhetorical bluster so beloved by the New Right,” says the Times, referring to the “administrative state,” whose “governmental power” he wanted to see destroyed, as the “secret Communist movement inside America.”
In 2024, when the Times asked whether Roberts believed that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, he said “no” because there were “unknowns.”
Roberts says the difficulty in the conservative movement right now "is trying to figure out how we can all respect each other’s differences of opinions.”
Yet in Roberts’ 2024 book, notes the Times, Roberts says conservatives must “plant new trees — that is, found new institutions.” And be willing "to destroy the institutions that can’t be saved.”
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